How Weeping Spends The Night

How Weeping Spends the Night. This story starts out with Al Hartung, a housing developer, getting amnesia either from a traffic accident or because of the financial mess his business is in. Three friends whom he’s known for twenty years – since college – try to help him get his memory back. These friends are Bernie Gross, a lawyer; Tim Slaton, a painter/artist; and Kyle Paulson, a Protestant Minister.

Just as Al is becoming functional again, he and Kyle get caught in a drive-by shooting. Al goes back into shock and Kyle, hit by a stray bullet, becomes paralyzed from the waist down. Al’s other two friends show less obvious disabilities. Bernie has a barely paternalistic weakness for pretty women and Tim has a past with women of the night that he wants to keep from his live-in girlfriend.

As each of the four men fall short of what is expected of them, their mates come more onto center stage. Al’s wife Linda, who manages a small chain of fitness centers, decides to divorce Al because, while she can stand to nurse him, she can’t put up with his bullying. Tim’s girlfriend britt, a model much younger than him, becomes frustrated with Tim’s secretiveness about his past and tries to start an affair with Bernie. Bernie’s wife Megan, who works as a lawyer in his law firm, decides that she has to take over their marriage to keep it intact. Terry, Kyle’s wife who once was a chemist but is now a long time home person, finds herself being pushed into the background as defeating his disability becomes more of a challenge to Kyle than keeping the spark of romance alive in their marriage. To get them through their difficulties, both Terry and Kyle have to come even more face to face with their Christian reality, probably not too unusual for a minister and his wife.

All of the couples, except Tim and Britt, have kids in one configuration or another and these children for the time being seem to do a better job of growing up than their parents do of growing old.

How Weeping Spends the Night is both a parody and a parable. It is a parody on how we change and rearrange partners. Its parable is that the hurt that comes from not giving is greater than the hurt that comes from not receiving.

Beyond Divining. This story is about a man named Todd Farrell who loses his wife Daphne to her job at an advertising agency. Todd is irritated and bewildered because his competition is not another man, but rather Daphne’s lifestyle, a lifestyle that Daphne doesn’t necessarily want but thinks she should have. Drawn into the couple’s fighting are Paul Mournier, Daphne’s boss, who lives in terror as Daphne’s difficulties one after another spill over into her work place, and Becky Newton, their marriage counselor, who in the end has to resort to doing handstands to get Todd and Daphne’s attention. Daphne also has a teenage son, Eric; the two can never seem to get on the same wavelength.

The person who is the straw who stirs the drink in the story is an old timer named McGillivary. McGillivary has a reputation for being able to fix things. He can fix anything from mechanical contraptions to city politicians. In the story he is asked to fix Todd and Daphne’s marriage. McGillivary has no patience for backsliding and reticence that people try to pass off as politeness. He tries to believe that in relationships there are some codes that are black and white and you should follow them. Although he is a Bible-thumper, he lives his life in such a way that he shows that it takes more courage sometimes to make exceptions than it does to make rules.

The Portable Courmeer. Walter Courmeer is a passably well known novelist who wrote between the two World Wars. He is a person who has followed the crowd: an Ivy League education, Paris in the Twenties, social outrage during the Depression, out to the West Coast in the late Thirties. Near t